But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and
all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou
take unto thyself, and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies,
which the Lord thy God hath given thee.

—Deuteronomy 20:14

After the day’s twenty-sixth mortar round fell on Camp War
Eagle, some staff officer up at division headquarters finally saw
fit to task a drone to search for whoever was lobbing the shells at
us. A few hours passed, and another barrage of 60-millimeter death
hummed in to shred an unlucky mechanic’s leg as he took a smoke
break outside our barracks, before division staff passed down an
eight-digit grid, coordinates taken from the drone, which put the
origin of the mortar fire about two klicks to our east, in the
middle of a dense marsh.

Click for larger view

Photo by Staff Sgt. Russell Bassett

We mounted our tanks and rumbled out the camp’s front gate.
Slumped in the gunner’s station, I rubbed eyes sore and dry from
dust, lack of sleep and too much sun. Private Rodney Sleed drove,
having folded his tall, lanky frame down below in the hull; above
me, Sergeant First Class Blornsbaum rode in the tank commander’s
seat. Sleed’s dog, Frago, traveled in the stuffy turret, splayed
near my boots, panting and looking confused in the absurdly happy
way that dogs do. Months earlier, Sleed had found Frago running
feral in the open desert, and over the intervening time, the dog,
which looked sort of like a large fox, had grown into his current
role as our platoon’s unofficial mascot. Blornsbaum hated that dog;
he hated all dogs but feared disturbing the luck Frago had brought.
We hadn’t had a KIA since Frago had started riding out on missions
with us, and Blornsbaum, like many longtime soldiers a
superstitious pragmatist, had not yet brought himself to force
Sleed to get rid of his canine war trophy.

That afternoon I remember the taste of parched earth heated by
the sun and the smell of burning garbage drifting over us as we
drove north and hit a dilapidated cloverleaf and the highway
beyond. In the median, squatters cultivated plots of soybean and
rice. Their mud-brick hovels lined both sides of the road, and on
the shoulder, Iraqi kids hawked black-market gasoline funneled into
repurposed two-liter soda bottles. Meat sellers manned stalls with
palm-thatched roofs and straw floors sticky with coagulating blood:
goats, chickens and sheep were kept there in wire pens, dressed and
butchered for customers on the spot.

To reach the marsh indicated by the drone, we skirted Sadr City,
a slum on the east side of Baghdad where block after block of
rickety tenements housed a million people. Groups of young men,
zoned out on generic Valium and some of them armed, milled
shiftlessly over the streets, waiting for the war to end or to
begin for real—nobody was sure exactly where the situation was
headed, though we knew Sadr City was a place you did not want to go
if you could help it. We took the long way around. The spare,
outlying land stretched into fields muddy with sewage and pocked by
scummy old tires, windblown paper, hillocks of brick, gravel and
smoldering trash mounds. Shepherds drove their flocks to these
dumping grounds to graze on garbage. The mutton must have tasted
foul.

Over narrow alleys, low-hanging power lines crisscrossed in a
piratical scheme of splices and countersplices. Packs of feral
dogs, most looking like some variant of Frago, ran the streets,
fighting for scraps, and naked children toddled around
crust-scrimmed rivulets of slime that seeped into open culverts
along hard-packed roads and then into larger irrigation canals that
formed a pattern like a jangled spiderweb across Baghdad. All the
water eventually fed the Tigris. The sharp smell of the river hung
over the city; the experience was similar to being shut in a
sunbaked latrine: human waste, rotting food, industrial runoff,
biting horseflies swarming over anything that tasted like life.

Hearing our convoy of tanks...

You must be logged in through an institution that subscribes to this journal or book to access the full text.

Shibboleth

Shibboleth authentication is only available to registered institutions.

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.